In
the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza, many supporters of Israel have doubled down
on the idea that Jews can only be safe in a state whose government they control
through majority rule and laws favoring Jews over non-Jews.
اضافة اعلان
This
idea — a fundamental tenet of Zionism, first articulated by Theodor Herzl in
his pamphlet, The Jewish State (1896)
— is what led the United Nations to vote for creating the state of Israel in
1948, despite the united opposition of Palestinian and Arab spokespersons.
How
has this belief held up in the light of the past 75 years?
Have
Israel’s repeated wars against its Arab neighbors — Egypt, Syria, Jordan,
Lebanon, and Iraq — kept Jews safe?
Have
even the most draconian methods succeeded in stamping out the resistance of the
indigenous Palestinian population to military rule and forced displacement?I
would argue the opposite of what many are claiming. Rather than proving that
the state of Israel keeps Jews safe, the bloodshed shows that Israeli Jews
cannot expect to enjoy security by imposing a brutal siege, erecting walls,
multiplying checkpoints, demolishing homes, confiscating land, and
dehumanizing, imprisoning, or killing any Palestinians who stand up for their
rights, whether nonviolently or violently.
People
inclined to question the claim that Jewish safety depends on the existence of a
strong Jewish state often fear being accused of antisemitism. Yet opposition to
Zionism has always existed within the Jewish community.
When
Herzl launched the Zionist movement in 1897, the vast majority of the world’s
Jews rejected it as a dangerous heresy. German rabbis objected so strenuously
to Herzl’s holding the first World Zionist Congress in Munich that he moved its
venue to Basel, Switzerland.
In
those early years, rabbis representing the entire spectrum of Jewish theology denounced Zionism on both religious and political
grounds. Orthodox rabbis accused Zionists of usurping the role of the Messiah,
whose coming was to redeem the Jewish people from spiritual exile and usher in
the universal reign of peace, justice, and righteousness.
Reform
rabbis in the US decried the attempt to establish a Jewish state. Indeed,
Reform Judaism’s Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 had already specified: “We consider ourselves no longer a
nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to
Palestine . . . nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish
state.”
Politically,
both Orthodox and Reform rabbis feared that by calling on Jews to emigrate to
Palestine, Zionism would impugn their patriotism and imperil their status as
loyal citizens of the countries in which they resided.
During
and after World War I, Zionists won influence not over the Jewish public or the
rabbinate, but over key statesmen who could help them achieve their aims. Thus,
the British Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann convinced U.K. Foreign Secretary
Arthur James Balfour that it would be in the country’s interest to establish a
“national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, which could serve both to
divert Jewish immigrants away from Britain and to protect British imperial
holdings in the Middle East.
Simultaneously,
US Zionist leaders, chief among them US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis,
courted President Woodrow Wilson, who gave his blessing in 1917 to what became
the Balfour Declaration.
The
Balfour Declaration gained the support of some non-Zionist Reform Jews, thereby
blunting their opposition to Zionist ideology. Further undermining any
effective opposition, non-Zionists agreed to collaborate with Zionists without
endorsing their aims.
Nevertheless,
prominent Jews continued to raise their voices against the Zionist goal of a
Jewish state. In Britain, the sole Jewish member of the cabinet, Edwin Montagu,
voted against the Balfour Declaration, warning that it would make Palestine’s
Muslims and Christians “foreigners” in their land, while making Jews
“foreigners in every country but Palestine.” In the U.S., 299 distinguished
Jews signed a statement to the post-World War I Paris Peace Conference of 1919,
which was presented to President Wilson by the German-born Jewish congressman
from San Francisco, Julius Kahn. It read: “We protest against the political
segregation of the Jews and the re-establishment in Palestine of a
distinctively Jewish State as utterly opposed to the principles of democracy
which it is the avowed purpose of the World’s Peace Conference to establish.”
Although
dissenting Jews failed to prevent Zionists from advancing toward their goal in
Palestine, where the League of Nations granted Britain a mandate for administratively preparing the
country to become a “Jewish national home,” Zionism remained a minority
movement among Jews until the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. Two factors then
combined to win a majority of Jews over to the Zionist claim that antisemitism
could never be eradicated and that only a Jewish state could provide a secure
refuge. First, in one European country after another, previously
well-integrated Jewish citizens found themselves dismissed from their jobs,
their shops and businesses smashed, their homes raided, and their community
members rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Second, the US, which had
hitherto served as the main refuge from persecution for Jews, closed its doors
in 1924 by passing a law that drastically restricted the immigration of groups
deemed undesirable.
Yet,
even as American Jewish sentiment shifted in favor of creating a Jewish state
in Palestine for refugees from Nazism, anti-Zionist Jews advocated alternative
solutions. The American Council for Judaism, founded by Reform Jews in 1942, campaigned vigorously both to liberalize U.S.
immigration policy and to establish a “democratic, autonomous government in
Palestine, wherein Jews, Moslems, and Christians shall be justly represented”
and endowed with “equal rights and . . . equal responsibilities.” The
International Jewish Labor Bund, a socialist organization transplanted in the
United States by refugees from Eastern Europe, called for “a common democratic state [in
Palestine] based on the principles of equal community rights for both Jews and
Arabs,” as well as “international brotherhood and mutual respect.”
Instead,
Zionism triumphed with the creation of Israel as a Jewish state. Palestinians
paid a high price for the solution that the Western world chose to compensate
Jews for the Nazi Holocaust. Between 1947 and 1949, Zionist militias drove
750,000 Palestinians, amounting to half the country’s Arab population, out of
their native land and destroyed more than 500 of their towns and villages. The
Jewish Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has called this process “the ethnic cleansing
of Palestine.”
Palestinians call it the Nakba,
Arabic for “catastrophe.”
The
consequences haunt the world to this day. Approximately 200,000 Palestinians
fled to Gaza. This more than tripled the population of that small coastal
enclave, which now numbers 2.3 million, two-thirds of whom are descendants of
refugees. The remainder fled to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and other
countries, where most of their descendants have languished in refugee camps for
75 years under miserable conditions. Israel has never complied with U.N. General Assembly
Resolution 194, which stipulated that “refugees wishing to return to their
homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at
the earliest practicable date.” The Zionist objective of maintaining a Jewish
majority required preventing any such return.
At
the close of the 1947-49 war, 150,000 Palestinians remained within the borders
of what became Israel, a quarter of whom were internally displaced from their
original homes. Israel granted them citizenship but imposed martial law on them
until 1966. Now amounting to 21 percent of Israel’s population, Palestinian
citizens continue to face severe discrimination, as well as land confiscation
and home demolition.
Another
300,000 Palestinians became refugees in June 1967, when Israel launched a war
against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, allegedly to preempt an “all-Arab attack.”
Conquering Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank of Jordan in six days,
Israel acquired a Palestinian population larger than the one it had expelled in
1947-49. Since then, it has kept the West Bank under military occupation while
filling it with Jewish settlements; lifted its military occupation of Gaza only
to replace it with a strangling blockade in 2007; and squeezed more and more
Palestinians out of East Jerusalem.
Currently,
violent settlers in the West Bank are destroying Palestinian villages and
driving their inhabitants away with the explicit intent of enacting another Nakba, or as the Jewish Israeli
historian Benny Morris once put it, “finishing the job.” (In a
pro-Israel rally in Washington, D.C. on November 14, 2023, at least one
demonstrator carried a sign that explicitly demanded “Let Israel Finish the
Job.”)
Meanwhile,
in retaliation, the Israeli army has been bombing Gaza for more than eight
weeks, flattening homes, schools, hospitals, water plants, sewage treatment
facilities, and bakeries, depriving Gazans of food, water, electricity, and
fuel, and forcing more than 80 percent of Gazans to flee under constant
bombardment from the north to the south of the already overcrowded territory,
where no safe haven exists. Never needs to envision alternatives seemed more
urgent than now, as we face the horror of the genocide that Israel is
perpetrating on Palestinians — with the full support of the U.S. and much of
the Western world.
Consequently,
increasing numbers of Americans — Jewish and non-Jewish alike — are repudiating
the unconditional championship of Israel that our government is mandating.
Still, many Jews regard Israel as central to their identity, hence sacrosanct.
Very few realize that Israel only became central to Jewish identity after the
six-day war when its military prowess won the admiration of the Western world
and thus gifted Jews with a powerful new self-image, as documented by Jonathan D. Sarna in American Judaism: A History. A construct invented so recently can
surely be dismantled and replaced by a source of Jewish identity more in
harmony with the ethical values that most Jews hold dear.
A
variety of Jewish groups have already begun this work. Among them is Jewish Voice for Peace, an intergenerational and
multiethnic organization founded in 1996 that features a rabbinical council and Havurah Network and that envisions “a world where
all people — from the U.S. to Palestine — live in freedom, justice, equality,
and dignity”; IfNotNow, a movement of young Jews, which
emerged in response to Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza and which focuses on
mobilizing the Jewish community “to end US support for Israel’s apartheid
system and demand equality, justice, and a thriving future for all Palestinians
and Israelis”; and Judaism On Our Own
Terms,
formerly known as Open Hillel, a network of independent, diverse, radically
inclusive, “justice-minded, student-led Jewish communities” on college
campuses, committed to enabling “alternative meanings and realities of
Jewishness,” “free from dictates of the legacy Jewish institutions that
constrain us and distort Judaism.”
In
sum, Jews seeking to rebuild their identity on a foundation that does not depend
on the oppression and erasure of Palestinians can find many models.
Carolyn L. Karcher is professor
emerita of English, American studies, and women’s studies at Temple University,
where she taught for 21 years and received the Great Teacher Award and the
Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2002. She is the author of Shadow
Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America
(1980); The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria
Child (1994); and A Refugee from His Race: Albion W. Tourgée and His Fight
against White Supremacy (2016). She has also edited scholarly reprints of works
by several 19th-century writers, including Tourgée’s novel about Black
Reconstruction in North Carolina, Bricks Without Straw.
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